Hacktavism - All Together in the Vitual

This article about hacking is my first experience with hacking. The idea that programs could be developed to hack into high up places like NASA which has government programs and secrets. These programs could be detrimental to a government or a corporation, many files could be stolen or destroyed. With such a hash program hurting peoples files it would make it hard to replace them. I was quite confused when they were discussing how hacking was not burglary or theft, just because there is a trace of the hacker left behind unlike in burglary. I was confused how hacking was different then what I thought about hacking, I thought hacking was a way of destroying or something but they consider it something different. I didn't quite understand the view they took on hacking.

Facillitation

Women and Games

Women in the gaming industry are rising, for me, growing up playing games like Mario, from Super Mario, to Mario Party, and Mario Kart. As I grew up being a girl most of my friends didn't play much video games, I also grew up like my friends playing sports. My parents treated video games as a way to get together for some healthy competition on weekend mornings. As a family my favorite memories were the mornings we would compete and play Mario Kart and eventually that developed into Xbox and Wii games. I found the questions asked like Why do female gamer play digital games? What are female gamer perception of themselves and their gaming experience? How do these perceptions influence their decisions to play and purchase digital games? I found these questions interesting especially having friends who game they perceive themselves as one of a kind or bad-ass. They do know they are numbered compared to the male population but they seem to love it. I also find it exhilarating when you beat a boy at their own game, kind of like "nah nah I beat you at your own game."

Erogenous Zones

This article discusses the pornography industry and how it has developed over the years and how is has effected the digital economy. There is a fight going on about how the porn industry goes about being apart of the digital world. Porn is a industry that has spread from print to digital, the digital industry is spreading and cannot stop spreading and allowing people to search it or possible stumble upon it. Groups try to fight the porn industry and looking at the chart adult videos and escort services are two of the largest legal sections of the porn industry these alone being in 20 billion dollars and 11.5 billion dollars. There are people who disagree with the industry but personally if they are helping boost the economy then I can't see how it could be that bad. If people want to search pornography they can choose to do that but there needs to be a way to limit the access to pornography sites in public areas. Places like libraries and and open WiFi networks like in stores and cafes.

Question: How do you think the pornography industry is helping the economy and how do you think it is hurting the economy?

May 30th

It was my 21st birthday....

Biocolonialism, Genomics, and the Databasing of the Population

Biocolonialism  can be seen as a way to take DNA samples from different races for economic or medical reasons. The idea that they were planning on categorizing DNA samples in a database seems kind of cool to me. Personally I think they should just do it for everyone kind of like a census. That way when certain ethnicity and small tribes all over the world change and move or in the case that they die out there will still be a record that one day they did exist. Personally I had no idea places like gene banks existed, I guess I assumed there were labs like this but I didn't know that companies could specialize in being a storage place for these genes. I had heard of the Human Genome Diversity Project but I was never really sure exactly what they did. After reading the article I can see how this could be helpful to science and genome mapping. I can understand how this could be helpful to science, but I ca also understand where certain colonies and small societies can see why they don't want this to happen. They don't want people to have access to their genes for any purpose other than science, they don't want any medical use of their gene and especially no economic use of their genes.

Question: What do you think they could do with these genes that could be harmful to the societies the genes came from? How could this project be altered so that nothing bad could come of it?

White Flight in Networked Pubics

This article discusses the possibility that the choice in social networking site says about the person who chose the cite. Most people don't see the difference they just follow the flow of the new thing. The movement from Myspace to Facebook for me was just because it was a new way to connect with friends. Myspace was the place that people were considered to be left behind. I know that when I started making mew friends in high school I would really wanted to be able to contact them or do fun stuff online I knew at that point I needed to Facebook. Most people now consider Facebook to be a great way to meet people and contact people Myspace kind of fell short in that way. Personally I only used Myspace because I could customize my page and being an artist that was just fun creating new layouts and webpage schemes. I also only used it for the music, now Facebook has allowed us to do pretty much all of that on a nicer more updated format. With linking Spotify and allowing people to customize the timeline with cover photos and so on.